HOUSTON (AP) — Sharon Carr is frustrated. Like many others who lost power after Hurricane Beryl slammed into the Texas coast earlier this week, she went to a cooling center in Houston to get relief from summer heat while the city's utility company warned that restoring everyone's electricity could take longer than they might hope.
“There’s too much wind, we don’t have power. It’s raining a long time, we don’t have power,” said Carr, who also went without electricity for a week in May when a destructive storm known as a derecho swept through the area.
Carr, who works for the city's transportation and drainage department, thinks more could be done to keep the lights on — or at least restore them more quickly — if Houston and other urban areas prone to severe weather would stop focusing on immediate problems and look at the bigger picture, including climate change.
“This shouldn’t keep happening," she said. "If it’s broke, let’s fix it.”
Hurricane Beryl is the latest in a long line of devastating storms to paralyze Houston, underscoring the city’s inability to sufficiently fortify itself against weather events brought on by climate change. Past storms such as Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Harvey in 2017 made clear that the city needed to remove trees, bolster its flood-plain protections and bury more power lines underground, but those efforts fell short or were completely overwhelmed by recent storms that have inundated the city and knocked out power to millions.
With climate change heating up ocean water, fueling storms that are more powerful and intensify much faster, experts say cities need to rethink how they prepare and respond to such events.
“It’s a totally different game that we’re playing today,” said Michelle Meyer, director of the Hazard Reduction & Recovery...
